Assigned Reading

Boys and girls are different.  Their taste in books is best pictured using a Venn diagram - it overlaps in part but not entirely.  I am reminded of this whenever I start gushing about a book I loved as a child to my husband only to find out that he didn't read it.  And how can you understand someone without appreciating the books she holds dear?  So I'm "assigning" him the following books, not all of which are children's books.  They are all books that I have read over and over again.  He's worried that they are all girly books about emotions.  Here, in no particular order, is his homework.  Most are classics that require no description. 

1. All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor

2. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

3. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

4. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg

5. Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk 

6. Time and Again by Jack Finney 

7. The Ramona series by Beverly Cleary   

8. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

 What traditionally girly books do you wish the men and boys in your life would read?

Annuals

Growing up, my family was lucky enough to be able to spend part of each summer at our country house in the Catskills.  Although we always brought new books with us, we had a few books that remained at the country house during the year.  These were not "back-up" books for when we exhausted what we'd brought.  To the contrary - one of the joys of going to the country house was reading and rereading the "country house books" annually.  As I got older, they included Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk, the story of a Jewish girl's coming of age in the 1930s and Belles on Their Toes  (the sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen, which, strangely, I don't think we had at the country house), both by Frank B. Gilbreth and his sister Ernestine Gilbreth Carey.  In them, the sibling authors tell the story of their family which consisted of 12 children and their parents, the efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth.  (I guess if you're going to have a dozen kids, you might as well be an efficiency expert!)  These are still some of my favorite books.

Now that I have brought my own kids to the country house, I have rediscovered the picture books that my mom has kept there these past 30+ years.  When a friend's recent Facebook post requesting children's book recommendations garnered several votes for The Saggy Baggy Elephant (A Little Golden Book), I thought, oh, a country house book!  While this sweet story has a moral (looks don't matter, your family will love you no matter what), the most fun part of reading it is doing Sookie the elephant's happy dance with him: one, two three, kick! one two three, kick! 

Maybe my mom had a thing for elephants, because another favorite country house book is The Circus Baby by Maud Fuller Petersham.  A mother elephant admires the way the clown family eats with utensils and wants to raise her baby to be similarly civilized.  Chaos ensues as the baby elephant attempts to eat with a spoon and mother elephant learns to accept the limitations (if that's what they are) of elephanthood and not push her baby to be what he is not.  The illustrations are charming and the book is not pedantic in the least.

Finally, If I Had a Lion by Liesel Moak Skorpen, tells of a little girl's plan for a lion to become her best friend and companion.  They would take care of each other when they were sick, play with each other and generally keep each other company.  Again, the illustrations are delightful and despite the fact that the little girl must be lonely, the book is not sad.

Of course, I am writing these reviews from memory because the books are not here - they are at the country house.  It would be a violation of an unwritten family rule to purchase them - or even read them - during the rest of the year.  So here's to next summer, when I will read all of these again (and again, and again, and again.)

If I Had to Pick Just One...

Please check out my guest post over at Annie and Aunt about what picture book I'd choose if I had to pick just one favorite (heaven forbid!).

To Get All Meta on You: Books about Books, Libraries and Reading

Because of my aforementioned library addiction, I hold books that mention libraries and books, and those that feature readers, especially dear.  One of my favorites is the All-of-a-Kind Family series by Sydney Taylor.  This series follows the lives of five sisters growing up on the Jewish Lower East Side (where I grew up!) at the turn of the last century.  All but the first book are out of print, but many used copies can be found online.  There are five books in the series.

One week Sarah, the responsible, studious middle child, loses her book.  She is terrified to tell the librarian and devastated to hear of the cost to replace it.  Don't worry - it all works out in the end.  Not only that, but both the librarian and Ella, the oldest daughter, find love in or through the library.  Ella's beau (a much better word than boyfriend, don't you think?) actually introduces himself by sending her a note in a book she had hidden in the stacks.  What could be more romantic?

But the best book-within-a-book reference in this series comes in the third book (confusingly called More All-of-a-Kind Family, while the second is All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown), when Henny finds Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery the then-just-published sequel to Anne of Green Gables at the library one day. This reference sent me running to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_green_gables. 

Somehow I'd always thought that the Anne books had been written in the 1920s at least, which would have post-dated Henny's discovery.  But no, the first was published in 1908, with Anne of Avonlea coming out just a year later.  So that means some of my favorite fictional characters were enjoying another one of my favorite fictional characters - how cool is that!

Although this blog is geared more toward younger audiences (at least for now, while my own children are young), I can't write a post about books about books, reading and libraries without mentioning one for older readers, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. 

My fruitless search for an image of the edition I have (how attached we can get to the edition and cover art of a book! - only the link to All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown shows the cover art I remember from that series) did lead me to another nice discovery: that Anna Quindlen, one of my favorite essayists and novelists who has written her own book-length essay on the joys of reading http://www.amazon.com/How-Reading-Changed-My-Life/dp/0345422783/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293227557&sr=1-1, has written a foreword to this book http://www.amazon.com/Grows-Brooklyn-Betty-Quindlen-Foreword/dp/898840436X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293227517&sr=1-2.  Being me, I promptly put a library hold on this edition.

There are many lovely moments in the book describing Francie, the protagonist, taking joy in books and words and in the library itself, but the description of how Francie learns to read is simply perfect: 

"Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words!

For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word.  But one day, she look at a page and the word mouse had instantaneous meaning.  She looked at the word and the picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind.  She looked farther and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat.  The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself....

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading.  She would never be lonely again..."

And there you go.